make our sun stand still
by LittleLongHairedOutlaw
Summary: 1920 - Sorelli is six when she first meets Christine. It is not strange for the other girl to be a time traveller. 1933 - she tries to disentangle her feelings of love for Christine. 1934 - she meets Philippe de Chagny. 1938 - things start to fall apart. 1939 and 1945 and a world in between and before as she wrestles with what's in her heart. Sorelli/Christine. Sorelli/Philippe


**A/N: ****Originated with a prompt from rscoil on tumblr requesting Christine/Sorelli with time travel and mutual pining.**

**Title from 'To His Coy Mistress' by Andrew Marvell.**

* * *

The first time it happens she is six. Mama and Papa both out of the house, and she hears the rattle and thinks it's the Tans but even she knows the Tans come from outside even though she hasn't seen them, even though they haven't come for her Papa.

(They came for Eoin's Papa, but her Papa said that Eoin's Papa is a toe-rag, and there were other things too but her Mama warned her that if she repeated them there would be no plum for dessert, and there weren't many plums anyway but she wanted one.)

Maybe a bird has gotten down the chimney. If a bird has gotten down the chimney then it might be trapped and she'll have to save it and let it out or Mama will get cross, and Mama has been sad so she doesn't want to make her cross.

Nodding to herself, resolved that she is going to rescue this little bird, she puts aside the doll she's been playing with, and fixes her dress, and wanders towards the source of the noise.

Really it's as simple as opening a door into the next room, but she pretends to herself that it's a grand adventure, that she's the Countess and her doll is one of the Volunteers and it's not her house but the GPO and they're hunting down the British soldiers because these are the stories she's heard and Martha's Mama tells them and makes them so exciting it's like the soldiers are right outside.

And when she opens the door there is no little bird and there are no soldiers, but there _is_ a little girl like her but with golden curls, and she thinks she should be frightened or maybe she should fight the little girl, but the girl is only the same size as her and anyway, she's _naked_.

Is she one of the fairies her Nana warned her about?

Nana's always warning her about fairies and pooks, but even she knows fairies aren't supposed to be little girls. They're supposed to be _something_ but not little girls. And they're not supposed to be naked.

She might be cold.

Her Papa always says it's best to be straight-up and she's not sure what that means but she thinks this is one of the times he would be straight-up. "Do you want a dress?"

The girl frowns at her, and she's so pale that she just might be a fairy but are fairies supposed to be pale? "Sorelli?"

No one calls her Sorelli. Her Papa calls her Ellie May and her Nana calls her Eleanor and her Mama calls her Ellie and no one calls her _Sor_elli but it feels like it might be her name.

It sounds like a name a Countess might have and she decides she likes it, and nods.

"Yeah and who are you?"

The girl's eyes shine bright blue. "Christine."

* * *

After the sixth time she stops counting Christine's visits. She tried telling Mama about them, but Mama gave her that smile that means she's thinking of other things and said "that's nice, dear." She might have told Nana but Nana would have told her Christine is a fairy and to stay away from her but Christine _isn't_ a fairy because Christine never tried to give her anything and never tried to take her away anywhere and those are the things fairies are supposed to do. She might have told Papa but Papa has been tired a lot, so she decides Christine will be her secret.

(She might have told Martha, and Kitty, and Eoin, but they might have thought it was part of a game and whoever Christine is Ellie knows she is not a game.)

She gives Christine old dresses to wear, but it doesn't matter because when Christine disappears (and she _does _disappear because Ellie has seen it and the first time it frightened her but the second time she knew what to expect so she wasn't frightened but she was lonely afterwards), when Christine disappears the dresses stay behind on the floor, and she folds them up neat and puts them away and knows Christine is not a game because the dresses are warm, as warm as Kitty's dresses when they swap.

By the sixth time, shortly after her seventh birthday, Christine's visits become something she expects, something that makes her excited, makes her belly flutter in the way that it does at Christmas, the way Mama says is like butterflies. And she knows when Christmas is, but she never knows when Christine will arrive.

They play with her dolls, and with the new kitten that Kitty gave her and she calls Squeaks, and Christine sings songs she has never heard before, and tells her about her Papa who plays a violin and moves back in time like her, and about crossing the ocean in an _aeroplane_.

Ellie has never seen an aeroplane, but Eoin says the British soldiers have them for dropping bombs on Germans.

Christine said nothing about bombs though.

Maybe they don't have bombs or guns, in the future where Christine comes from.

(The idea of travelling through time is one she accepts easier than fairies, because Christine is the proof of it and if Christine says it it must be true.)

* * *

She is ten the day her parents go to Dublin on the train. Christine keeps her company, and by now she has decided Christine is her best friend in the world, even though they only see each other sometimes. They don't play with dolls anymore, but they do play with Squeaks, and sometimes they read, and today they do neither, they go for a walk by the river and sing, and they might swim, maybe, but the it is too cold, so they sit on the riverbank and kick their feet in the water and look up at the clouds.

Christine is gone by the time her parents come home again. It is dark, so she is with Kitty, and when her mother takes her home, her father is crying when he hugs her. She has never seen him cry before. Something dark and creeping tightens in her throat and makes her want to cry too.

She does cry, then, when her mother hugs her, and tells her the doctor in Dublin says her father will have to go away for a while.

She's not stupid and she's not a little girl, not anymore. She's ten and she's read books, and she knows _going away for a while_ means he has tuberculosis, that that's why he coughs all night, and why he's so pale and tired all the time, but she doesn't want him to go away. Why would she want him to go away? Kitty's father went to Newcastle and he never came back, and Martha's mother went to Peamount and she did come back but she died a few months later, and so did Martha's baby sister, and Eoin has it in his bones and it bent his back and that's why he's not allowed to play anymore, and why he only sometimes comes to school.

She doesn't want her father to go away. She doesn't want him to go away and not come back, or come back different. She doesn't want him to die.

(By the time Christine comes again, he will already be dead. He went to Newcastle, and there was a haemorrhage in his chest, and Ellie never saw him again until the day they brought him back in his coffin, and he didn't much look like her father at all. They bury him and two days later Christine visits, an older Christine than she's used to, fourteen or fifteen, wearing clothes she stole somewhere, and she hugs her as she cries.)

* * *

She grows up, she finishes school. Christine comes four or five times a year, and sometimes more and sometimes less, and every one of her visits are precious, and every time she comes she is the same age as Ellie, give or take a year or two. It is like growing up with a special kind of cousin, with the dearest sort of friend.

She always knows Christine can never stay, knew that from the first moment when she was six, but it doesn't stop something in her heart aching to keep her close, always.

(Sometimes, she wishes she wouldn't come at all, so then she wouldn't have to go.)

She is sixteen when her mother dies. Sixteen, and alone in the world, and it is grief but it is shaped like being untethered.

She is seventeen when she almost marries a man. His hands are gentle and his kisses are sweet, but there is a catch in his breath and sometimes he tastes of iron and salt.

It is foolish to marry someone known to be suffering from tuberculosis. She breaks it off and does not regret it because she was not really in love with him anyway, she only thought she was, and no matter how much she tried she could never quite turn thinking into being.

(There is something like love, budding deep in her heart, but every time she turns her eyes to it it feels like it might crumble, so she does her best not to think on it, and on whose lips she longs to feel beneath her own, whose hands she wants to caress her thighs, whose hair she wants to kiss.)

(Tumbling blonde curls and smiling blue eyes and hands that are always soft, even wearing the most ridiculous of stolen clothes.)

Eoin tells her she should take up acting. It is be the last thing he tells her before he dies, the distortion of his spine gone into his ribs, eating into his lungs.

(Eighteen, just the same as her, and dead.)

(She lays flowers at his grave when all the mourners have gone, and no matter how she tries, no matter the numbness inside, the tears don't come.)

She's always fancied the thought of being a famous actress, like Clara Bow or Carole Lombard. She's watched them in the picture shows and wanted to be like them, and wondered how it would feel to kiss them. Better or worse than kisses she's known or merely different?

Christine tells her she thinks she would be a marvelous actress, and smiles that smile that makes her heart flutter.

She goes to Dublin in 1933. She sleeps with a man and his touch is the wrong touch but her touches are right and he puts her on stage. Ellie sounds too sweet of a name, and Eleanor too serious, but there is Spanish on her father's side, and her eyes are dark, her hair waving black curls, and there is the faintest cast to her skin that means she has never been as pale as other girls, could never be mistaken for a fairy.

She calls herself Sorelli, and smiles.

Two days later, she turns nineteen.

* * *

Christine comes ten times that year. She accosts her coming out the stage door and hugs her and the kiss she presses to her cheek makes Sorelli's skin burn. That time she stays a week, and Sorelli introduces her as her cousin from Galway, and they go to dances and an opera and share the same bed, and Sorelli wakes in the night and looks at that pale face and thinks of reaching over and kissing her. Not the chaste kisses they've shared pressed to cheeks and foreheads, but a proper kiss, on the mouth. Those blue eyes would flutter open, those lips smile against hers, and Christine's arms would draw her closer, her hands slip to curl around her hips…

She rolls out of bed and goes to the window and breathes slowly through her nose, willing her heart to settle, willing the ache to leave her chest and leave her be. She cannot love Christine, she cannot. How can she love someone who is always going to leave?

(She goes back to bed and manages to sleep, and when she wakes in the morning she is cold and alone.)

* * *

She is twenty when she meets Philippe. Twenty, and her star is in the ascendant in the theatres of Dublin, whispered over and not merely for how she reached the stage in the first place.

He is thirty and tall and broad, his smile bright and his touch gentle, and he kisses her without hesitation. It is three months since she saw Christine and they had a fight over something ridiculous, and she just needs _someone_, someone to touch her, someone to make her feel special because loving Christine is worse than loving a ghost because loving Christine means she cannot speak a word of it, not even to herself, not even in the darkness.

His arms circle around her, draw her close, and his voice is low in her ear as he whispers, _would you object…?_

She dips her fingers beneath his waistband, brushes warm skin that sends a thrill through her for need, and breathes, _not at all_.

(He is the gentlest lover she has ever known, and one night becomes two, becomes a week, becomes a month, and they fall together without speaking of it, and are photographed in the society columns as _Philippe de Chagny who might have been a Duke if his grandfather had not married a Catholic, and the famous La Sorelli, stepping out together…_)

(It is love of a sort, this she knows. A love different from what she feels for Christine, a love very different from what she thought she felt for the man in Athlone. It is a love it would be easy to live in, and she has no doubt that Philippe adores her, and that adoration eases something inside that she did not know was aching, even as it makes the aching for a different pair of hands worse.)

(Christine comes at last, after six months, and there is something sad and drawn in her face to see Philippe, but she smiles for the two of them and says, _I hope you'll be very happy._)

* * *

Christine's visits become rarer, two a year, maybe three. In the whole of 1937, she only comes once. It is easier this way, easier for Sorelli to pretend that the ache in her chest is simply for missing a friend, and nothing more. And if she sometimes dreams of playful kisses, of soft touches and curling blonde hair, then the face is sufficiently dim behind her eyes that she can pretend it is Philippe she dreams of.

(She wakes beside him, and sees the face she has resolved to love in place of another, easy and slack in sleep, and she kisses him and wonders if he can sometimes sense the secret that she keeps deep inside, if he might somehow know that her heart is not wholly his. Are her feelings a betrayal of him even if she never does anything about them?)

(Would she give into them if she could? If Christine were not Christine but someone who could stay?)

(Would she love her at all, if Christine were someone who could stay?)

Her acting becomes dancing, takes her to London and to Edinburgh and to Paris, and even, once, to Milan.

It is Paris she loves the best of them all. She goes for walks with Philippe and he buys her jewelry and hats and laughs as he kisses her and they eat in tiny little restaurants and nobody knows that he is the man who might have been a Duke and nobody knows she is the girl that appeared in Dublin one day without a history and slept her way to an acting career, and it is almost easy to pretend Christine is someone she simply dreamt about once.

(Almost easy, but never quite possible. Not when every blonde girl in the crowd or on the street makes something catch in her chest, and leaves her breathless.)

Midnight comes on the bank of the Liffey with fireworks and dancing and music, and Philippe draws her into his arms, and she smiles into his mouth as the bells toll the new year.

* * *

She turns twenty-four in the spring of 1938. There is a persistent ache in her left leg, just above her knee, that she puts down to strain, to overwork, and to the vigour of her nightlife with Philippe. She rubs in ointments but none of them take the gnawing throb away, and Philippe suggests maybe having an x-ray taken, in case she's damaged something, but she puts it off.

And then she puts it off a little longer.

June comes, the first visit from Christine in fourteen months (not that she was counting) and this Christine seems older than her, seems closer to thirty than twenty-five, something severe and strange about her eyes, and she frowns to see the new delicacy in Sorelli's walk, how she leans a little more to the right than she used to.

"I think you should have an x-ray taken." And something about it is meaningful, a stern firmness in her eyes, in her mouth, as if she would say more, but the laws of time prevent it.

(Sorelli has long since learned not to question Christine when she comes to visit and makes her cryptic remarks, and certainly not when Christine is older than her.)

She says she will, and then waits a month, because she'll be damned if she lets anyone tell her what to do, even someone she has known eighteen years, even someone who causes feelings she can barely disentangle.

In July, at last, she braces herself and goes to the hospital.

The x-ray shows tuberculosis in her femur.

The doctor is sympathetic, tells her how she'll have to lie up immediately with the leg immobilized, that even if it heals she might never dance again.

She feels only a deep spreading numbness, an odd sense of having somehow suspected.

She thinks of her father. She thinks of the man she might have married. She thinks of Eoin and his back and his ribs and his lungs, in the end.

Philippe's eyes are damp with tear when she tells him, his smile watery, and he releases a shaking sigh, and holds her close.

They spend a last night together, and his kisses are softer and gentler than ever.

* * *

The window beside her bed lets her see the moon. The cage they put her leg in keeps her from moving it at all. There are twenty more on her ward, girls and women both. The girl in the next bed is barely eighteen, another new admission, and has it in her spine. The cage they put _her_ in lets her only move her arms.

A little girl dies of meningitis that first night.

* * *

Philippe brings her books, and flowers, and chocolates, and visits her every day. He kisses her when he arrives, and again as he leaves, and twines his fingers with hers and brushes his thumb over the back of her hand. He tells her of happenings in the theatre, of his boat, and the races, and music, and she asks about the new suit he was having tailored, for the ball they were planning to attend. He tells her he'll keep her dress for her, for when she is well, and promises to wear his suit the next time he comes.

(He does, and it suits him wonderfully, and something soft settles inside of her at the sight of him.)

Still, for all the books he brings, for all the other girls on the ward, she is painfully bored between his visits, loneliness edging every part of her. She never knew how much she needed movement until she could not move at all.

(She watches the moon at night through her window, the stars, listens to the rattling of wheels out on the street, the movement of people, and aches to feel his touch, to feel his breathing against her neck, aches for anyone's touch at all. Aches for Christine.)

The girl in the next bed gets a letter every morning from her sweetheart, a Trinity medical student, and he visits her every afternoon, his dark hair slicked back and his smile soft and slow, and though the girl can hold the letters she gets, her cage makes it too awkward to read books, so he wears spectacles to read to her and they don't age him at all.

The two of them seem so _young_, but he must be nearly as old as Sorelli herself is.

She watches them, and feels fortunate that she, at least, can hug Philippe, can lean her head against his chest and hear his heart beating, unlike this Harrison girl and her boy.

After the sporadic visits of the last years, the long absences, it catches her off guard when Christine visits four times in the first week, and ten times in the next month. It is the first time she has visited so often or so consistently, even counting her visits when they were children, and though Christine seems to have a reliable supply of clothes, there is always that strange sadness lurking behind her eyes, and when Sorelli asks her of it she does not answer, only shakes her head.

(Something of her own time? Or something that she dare not speak of?)

The old love that has prickled in Sorelli's chest threatens to flare back to life.

Her acting friends visit, one by one, early in her stay, consoling visits but shallow all the same, but they never send her letters, and they never come back, as if, being incapacitated, she has ceased to exist for them.

She only has Philippe and Christine, now.

They are the one bright point in her life, and Philippe makes sure to never miss a day, and maybe he has been inspired by Harrison's medical student, but sometimes he even brings her letters, to read after he leaves, and they are always gentle and sweet, sometimes little more than sketches, sometimes odd scraps of poetry, or lines from books.

_Let me not to the marriage of true minds…_

_Nor would I love at lower rate…_

_See the mountains kiss high heaven…_

("Let's get married," he whispers, voice low in her ear, when she has been in four months, "when you get out of here." Always _when_, always certain, and she is not despairing but sometimes she wonders if it should not be _if_ instead of _when_ because the girl the other side of Harrison has been here seven _years_, but she doesn't say that, instead she nods, and kisses him with tears in her eyes and says, "if you want to." His laugh is sweet as he kisses her back. "Of course I want to.")

Christmas is miserable when she cannot go out, cannot see the world, and the other girls have bits of families to come to them, but Christine stays with her all day, and Philippe brings her a sketchbook when he can get away, and a pen and several pots of ink, and tells her to write her story. ("Your history is more thrilling than mine," and he kisses her lightly on the lips.) She would take him at his word, but she has no idea where to begin.

* * *

The ninth of March, and Philippe doesn't visit.

The tenth, and no sign of him, and the fear in her heart is inexplicable and creeping as Harrison's medical student glances at the still-empty chair by her bed, and something shutters behind his eyes.

The morning of the eleventh, and her visitor is not Philippe, not Christine, but Philippe's younger brother, Raoul, a boy who is all of fifteen, who she has met only a handful of times, and at the very sight of him, his dark clothes and pale face washed out, she knows.

She knows, and the pain that twists in her heart takes her breath away.

"How?" It's all she can do to frame the question, all she can do to whisper the word, and her voice is distant to her own ears, too steady, and the tears trickle from Raoul's eyes, his lips twisting.

"A bomb…his boat…" the boy's face crumples, his voice chokes, and he bows his head but she cannot hear him weep through the rush of blood in her ears.

* * *

Was it that she didn't love him enough? That she couldn't love him enough? Was it her hesitation over saying _yes_? Was it the love for Christine deep in her heart after all of these years? Did she curse him without ever wanting to?

(Was her Nana right, all those years ago? Is Christine really one of the fae, and instead of taking her has taken him?)

Was it just a twist of fate? Or a punishment for how she became an actress, how she met him? Retribution for the sins she's contemplated?

(Punishment for the straying of her love?)

* * *

There are tears in Harrison's eyes as she looks at her and says, "I'm sorry" and her medical student, when he visits, shakes her hand, his eyes heavy.

* * *

She is not allowed to leave her bed to go to the funeral. She lies still all day and keeps her eyes closed through the whispers from the next bed, and she knows Christine comes to visit, she knows it, but she pretends to be asleep, and it is not that she wishes she could follow Philippe, more that she wishes she had never loved Christine, and eventually Christine leaves.

* * *

She visits again a week later, her face pale and drawn, but this time Sorelli acknowledges her.

She has had a lot of time to think, sitting here alone, a lot of time to think and piece things together and she has remembered the look on Christine's face the first time she met Philippe, the mingled horror and surprise and her strained smile, and she has remembered the look that flickered in her eyes when she told her to have an x-ray, the sadness that has lingered in her face, and the way she flinched when her visit collided with Philippe's, two weeks before he died.

Too much time to think, and what she knows is deeper than the mingled guilt and grief in her chest.

"You knew, didn't you," and it is not a question, and it is barely an answer when Christine nods, her face tight. And Sorelli's heart twists but she clamps down on it because Christine knew, she _knew_ and she never warned her, never told her, never _did _anything to try and prevent it and he's gone, he's gone but Christine's still here and she's the one who's always supposed to leave, she's the one who never stays, not him, he's supposed to _be here_.

And all of that, when she tries to say it, comes out softly as, "I never want to see you again."

Christine nods again, and swallows, and rises, and now, at last, Sorelli closes her eyes, and lies back against her pillows, and when she hears the footsteps leaving she gives in, finally, to tears.

* * *

In July, after a year of the same four walls, of not being able to move, of being crowded in with twenty others, she is deemed healed.

(Why couldn't she have been healed five months ago? If she had been healed five months ago he might still be alive.)

The cage is taken off, she is given crutches and instructed to build the strength in her leg slowly, gentle exercise, swimming, if she can.

Her first stop is Glasnevin, but it is impossible to look at the headstone, at the name Philippe Roderick de Chagny and the dates of 1904 and 1939 and believe that he is really there beneath the ground, beneath the flowers and pebbles and grass.

She leaves, and goes back to her old apartment, and vows never to visit again.

* * *

The war comes. She rebuilds the strength in her leg. She returns to the stage, and though her heart pounds beneath the lights, and the exhilaration leaves her breathless, there is that space inside her, _be_side her, that she cannot fill.

(Philippe? Or Christine? Christine? Or Philippe? Philippe, just Philippe, and she will not allow it to be Christine.)

She takes tea with Raoul once a week because he asks her to, and they only sometimes talk of his brother, but she feels slightly less alone.

At night she sleeps alone and there are men who would take her into their beds, and women too, but she has no desire to look at any of them, all she wants is soft hands and blue eyes and blonde hair, be it long and curling or brushed back neat with that single lock falling over the forehead, and no one she sees is ever right.

No one is Philippe, nothing can bring him back, and she knows that, she knows it, fuck but how she _knows_ it, but none of them are Christine either.

* * *

She goes to London and works as a nurse by day, and dances at night as the bombs fall, and dreams of kisses and soft touches but never seeks them out.

When people ask, she gives them cryptic smiles.

In September 1943 she dances for what she tells herself is the last time, takes on extra work in Harefield where they're sending the wounded soldiers, and nurses alongside a man that it takes her too long to recognise as Harrison's medical student, gaunt and wraithlike from his own illness, and the memory is too sharp, too keen, so she goes back to London, and writes for a newspaper.

And she does not know it yet, but soon, in a little less than two years, it will be May of 1945, and she will have fulfilled what she considers her duty of keeping Raoul out of the war because the war will have ended and he will be studying history, and in the middle of the cheering crowd her eyes will catch a curl of golden hair, and she will turn, her heart hammering, and she will meet a face she once wished to never see again, and she will remember nights of loneliness as she reaches out and takes a soft hand, she will remember mingled grief and guilt and two types of love living in her heart, and she will decide to hell with it, to hell with it all, to hell with always leaving and never staying and having no history, and Christine's eyes will be wide with surprise, but her lips beneath Sorelli's will be just as soft, just as certain, as Sorelli ever dreamed.

* * *

**A/N: ****Please do let me know if you've enjoyed this fic, and I fully intend to write Christine's slant on things, which is an absolute thrill ride.**

**Now for some notes on historical details.**

**The first section makes reference to the Irish War of Independence, specifically to the Black and Tans - the force of ex-soldiers sent by the British to restore law and order and who became notorious for ransacking houses and acts of violence. Reference is also made to the 1916 Rising, specifically to Countess Constance Markievicz, the Irish Volunteers, and the GPO.**

**Newcastle and Peamount were two of the sanatoria where TB patients were sent, Newcastle in Wicklow and Peamount in Dublin. Waiting lists to gain entry were notoriously long, and patients were frequently sent home when they could no longer afford treatment, potentially infecting the rest of their family.**

**Holders of royal titles - especially such a high rank as that of Duke - risked losing title and lands by contemplating marriage outside the Protestant fate.**

**The source of Sorelli's own tuberculosis is left intentionally vague.**

**X-rays were a key diagnostic tool in detection of TB, be it pulmonary (in the lungs) or the bones.**

**The Harrison girl is based on Phyllis Harrison, who suffered from TB of the spine when she was eighteen and spent a year in hospital during the period 1938-1939. In January 1944 she married Noël Christopher Browne, after joining him in England at the height of the war where he had gone to work in the Harefield Hospital after qualifying as a doctor from Trinity College Dublin, following his own battle with tuberculosis. They met in 1936, so of course he is the medical student that appears.**

**The girl referenced as having spent seven years in hospital with spinal TB is based on a real patient that Phyllis Harrison knew during her stay in hospital.**

**Poems quoted are Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare, 'To His Coy Mistress' by Marvell, and 'Love's Philosophy' by Percy Shelley.**

**Glasnevin is of course Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.**


End file.
